On communication, privacy and open source

2014-10-04 opensource, software

I feel like the internet is a bit ill nowadays and I fear most people cannot
understand what is happening. We are facing an internet which seems to be more
and more controlled by very large companies offering commercial services to its
customers. Of course, there is absolute nothing wrong with people trying to make
money with the internet, but the way they are trying to accomplish this is a
huge issue.

Recently, I went out and asked people about their most used web applications. As
expected, most people told me they use Facebook to share activities and news
with their families and friends, WhatsApp to send messages, YouTube to watch
funny cat videos, Instagram to share photos and Dropbox to share files with
others. Surprisingly, very few people said they send emails to share information
and they seemed quite surprised when I asked about email because everyone uses
one of those big services. However, if they write mails, they are hosted at one
of the larger mail services.

I wanted to know more. Unfortunately, most Germans are incredible busy people
and almost nobody had time for a chat, but I was able to talk a bit. I asked
them if they are fine with large companies reading and selling their private
content on social network.

You’re asking your friend on WhatsApp if you should meet tonight. You agree to
meet in a club nearby. Of course, you want to tell all of your friends that
you have been there, so you check in using Facebook. And as you really enjoyed
your dinner, you share a picture of it on Instagramm.

They agreed.

Now WhatsApp, Facebook and all of their advertisement partners know you like
electronic music and you enjoy eating sushi. They also know where you have
been since your smartphone added GPS tags to your Facebook post and the photo
you uploaded on Instagram. The next time you visit Facebook, you will see
advertisements from a premium class bar next door and you will receive 20% off
on all drinks if you check in on Facebook. So you pay twice as much and your
advertisement target profile will get even more precise.

Obviously, I exaggerated a lot, but it made people think. Using large platforms
on the internet to communicate is nothing bad, but one really should think about
what to share and what not to share. Sure, most services provide privacy
settings to hide posts and profile information, but those settings only prevent
other users from view such information, not the provider and certainly not their
partners. As always, if you are not paying, you are the product and large free
services need a lot of money to operate the servers so they will work with
companies that pay for user profiles. Everyone should be aware of that.

The point I wanted to make: If you are not able to control the software, you do
not own your personal data and you have absolutely no control about what is
going to happen with the data. Even with very strict privacy settings, the
people with administration access will have full access to your private data.

If you want true control who can access your data, you have to be your own
administrator. The diaspora* network is a great alternative to
centralized social networks. MediaGoblin can replace YouTube,
Flickr and Instagram for private photos and videos. ownCloud can
replace Dropbox and provides a CalDAV and CardDAV server and some basic document
edit applications like Google Docs.

Of course, not everyone is able to host their own services, but everyone is able
to use free and open source software. If you have no own server to install such
services, ask your friends. If you have a tech-savvy friend, chances are high
that he has a server to host your stuff, too. Even if that’s not the case, there
are a lot of open instances running those services for you to use. Of course,
you still would not own your data, but at least your stuff is not stored on
large company servers and usually open source services are not going to use or
share your private data.

If you do not host the service yourself, you can encrypt the data, especially
when sending emails. It’s not hard at all, just give it a try.
Encryption makes it very hard for service provides (and, by the way,
intelligence agencies) to read your data.

Talking about free and open source software… Data stored in your mail client
and your web browser is very personal, too, and obviously you should prefer free
and open source alternatives like Firefox and
Thunderbird and there are really nice and easy-to-use Linux
distributions like manjaro to replace your Windows or Mac OS.

If you know what I am talking about, please do me a favor: Please teach people
around you about privacy and encryption. Also, please share and promote free and
open source software. Thank you. If you do not know what I am talking about, but
you want to learn more, ask someone. You can even ask me if you want
to, I will answer your questions! Using free and open source software is
important and everyone should work on improving and spreading them.